The government clued in and investigated and it turns out that Okinawan doctors were making a tidy profit by agreeing not to file death certificates. This enabled families to continue to claim pension benefits on behalf of their supposedly aged relatives.
After the the smoke died down the went back and looked at Okinawan life expectancy taking pension fraud into consideration and discovered that it was pretty much exactly the same as the rest of Japan. The original life expectancy/diet studies had relied on government information rather than actually interviewing people. I'm sorry I don't have a citation for you as I saw this in a documentary in Japan on TV.